Lech Walesa's Anti Gay Comments Tarnish His Human Rights Record

A national committee devoted to fighting hate speech and other crimes in Poland has filed a complaint with prosecutors in Gdansk accusing Lech Walesa of promoting a "propaganda of hate against a sexual minority", after the Nobel peace prize-winner said gay people had no right to a prominent role in politics.

Walesa said in a television interview on Friday that he believed gay people had no right to sit on the front benches in parliament and, if there at all, should sit in the back "or even behind a wall".

"They have to know that they are a minority and adjust to smaller things, and not rise to the greatest heights," he told the private broadcaster TVN during a discussion of gay rights. "A minority should not impose itself on the majority."

Walesa, Poland's first democratic-era president, is a deeply conservative Roman Catholic and a father of eight who has never advocated progressive social views. The democracy he helped create in 1989 from the turmoil of strikes and other protests has, however, been undergoing a profound social transformation in recent years.